In an effort to find the magic number the SALT team opened its testing labs again this week. Another 6 University of Manchester post graduate students spent the afternoon interrogating the Copac and John Rylands library catalogues to evaluate the recommendations thrown back by the SALT API.

With searches ranging from ’The Archaeology of Islam in Sub Saharan Africa’ to ‘Volunteering and Society: Principles and Practice’ no aspect of the Arts and Humanities was left unturned, or at least it felt that way. We tried to find students with diverse interests within Arts and Humanities to test the recommendations from as many angles as possible. Using the same format as the previous groups (documented in our earlier blog post ‘What do users think of the SALT recommender?’), the library users were asked to complete an evaluation of the recommendations they were given. Previously the users tested SALT when the threshold was set at 3(that is 3 people borrowed the book which therefore made it eligible to be thrown back as a recommendation), however we felt that the results could be improved. Previously, although 77.5% found at least one recommendation useful, too many recommendations were rated as ’not that useful’,(see the charts in ‘What do users think of the SALT recommender?’).

This time, we set the threshold at 15 in the John Rylands library catalogue and 8 in Copac. Like the LIDP team at Huddersfield, (http://library.hud.ac.uk/blogs/projects/lidp/2011/08/30/focus-group-analysis/), we have a lot of data to work with now, and we’d like to spend some more time interrogating the results to find out whether clear patterns emerge. Although, our initial analysis has also raised some further questions, it’s also revealed some interesting and encouraging results. Here are the highlights of what we found out.

The Results

On initial inspection the JRUL with its threshold of 15 improved on previous results;

Do any of the recommendations look useful:

92.3 % of the searches returned at least one item the user thought was useful, however when the user was asked if they would borrow at least one item only 56.2% answered that they would.

When asked, a lot of the users stated that they knew the book and so wouldn’t need to borrow it again, or that although the book was useful, their area of research was so niche that it wasn’t specifically useful to them but they would deem it as ‘useful’ to others in their field.

One of the key factors which came up in the discussions with users was the year that the book had been published. The majority of researchers are in need of up to date material, many preferring the use of journals rather than monographs, and this was taken into account when deciding whether a book is worth borrowing. Many users wouldn’t borrow anything more than 10 years old;

‘Three of the recommendations are ‘out of date’ 1957, 1961, 1964 as such I would immediately discount them from my search’ 30/08/11 University of Manchester, Postgraduate, Arts and Humanities, SALT testing group.

So the book could be a key text, and ‘useful’ but it wouldn’t necessarily be borrowed. Quite often, one user explained, rather than reading a key text she would search for journal articles about the key text, to get up to date discussion and analysis about it. This has an impact on our hypothesis which is to discover the long tail. Quite often the long tail that is discovered includes older texts, which some users discount.

Copac, with a threshold of 8 was also tested. Results here were encouraging;

Do any of the recommendations look useful;

Admittedly further tests would need to be done on both thresholds as the number of searches conducted (25) do not give enough results to draw concrete conclusions from but it does seem as if the results are vastly improved on increase of the threshold.

No concerns about privacy

The issue of privacy was raised again. Many of the postgraduate students are studying niche areas and seemed to understand how this could affect them should the recommendations be attributed back to them. However, as much as they were concerned about their research being followed, they were also keen to use the tool themselves and so their concerns were outweighed by the perceived benefits. As a group they agreed that a borrowing rate of 5 would offer them enough protection whilst still returning interesting results. The group had no concerns about the way in which the data was being used and indeed trusted the libraries to collect this data and use it in such a productive way.

‘It’s not as if it is being used for commercial gain, then what is the issue?’ 30/08/11 University of Manchester, Postgraduate, Arts and Humanities, SALT testing group.

Unanimous support for the recommender

The most encouraging outcome from the group was the uniform support for the book recommender. Every person in the group agreed that the principle of the book recommender was a good one, and they gave their resolute approval that their data was collected and used in a positive way.

All of them would use the book recommender if it was available. Indeed one researcher asked, ‘can we have it now?’